Moved

It's has been a BUSY last few months for us. So here's a quick update. Kelly and I bought a home. We've finally moved everything out of our apartment last week. Kelly started his new job at PWC (used to be known as Price Waterhouse Coopers) two weeks ago. I was in one of my very dear friend's wedding in Charleston this weekend and drove back late Saturday night. Kelly has just flown out to Dallas for work this morning, to which he will be flying each week until sometime in mid-July.

Well, that's us. More details and hopefully pictures of the house and wedding to come.

Chris and Katie's Halloween Party

We went to Chris and Katie Rees's halloween party last friday. The theme this year was famous couples. Now we're a little uncreative so we just used our costumes from this weekends party (Clue). It was a good crowd with great costumes and fabulous food. Here are a few pictures Katie took:

Clark Kent and Lois Lane

Juno and Paulie

Colette and Linguini (our wonderful host and hostess)!

Mrs. White and Professor Plum

The system decided to stop uploading pictures so I didn't get anything else but the group picture. Sorry for the costumes I missed. Katie, thank you for all your great pictures. You're parties are always the best! Happy Halloween!!!

Anniversary & Asheville

We officially suck at blogging! Okay, I keep forgetting I have one of these. It's not that we don't have stuff going on, because we do. It's just that I forget to take pictures and I forget to mention it.

Last week was our wedding anniversary. We have been married for three years now!
(Side note: trying to find that perfect anniversary gift is HARD!)
As a surprise Kelly took us up to Asheville. For anyone who cares about such things, President Obama was just there a few weeks ago. To be honest Asheville was not somewhere I had ever thought about going. The Biltmore's there but we can see huge multi-million dollar homes from our balcony so it wasn't a major draw for us but Kelly thought it might be a nice little mountain village that we could hike and explore. We were in for a real shock.

Ever wonder where all the hippies went? Well wonder no more I have the answer. They all went to Ashville!

Bless my husband, we stayed at the Grand Bohemian in the Biltmore village so we didn't see 'downtown' Ashville till the next morning. I have never seen so much tie-dye and long hair in my life! Not that I'm against long hair, I have it myself, but if it's all grey cut it off or dye it. They had some fun music being played on street corners but the surrounding crowds were smoking all kinds of things that were definitely not cigarettes.

One of the guys on my local radio show always jokes that Asheville is were all the state's liberals live. This is NOT a joke. Let me be clear, I am not hating on these groups here this is just going to be a general observation. The city was plastered with pro-Obama stickers and gay rights posters. As Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Bill O'Reilly fans, we were not a very welcome sight to most of the locals.

It wasn't the little mountain town we were hoping but it was educational. We took a few pictures but I haven't up-loaded them yet. I'll try to remember to do that when I get home tonight.

In the end the vacation was a little bit of a bust. Not a waste, just a bust. At least now we know not to build a vacation home there.

We decided our next trip will be Williamsburg and James Town. Good, old, dependable history. Plus Kelly found out that the Boy Scout's around here subsidize medals and patches at many of these historical sights. All you have to do is fill in information from different placards from around the sight and turn it back in to the visitor center. A lot of our upper ranking local Scout Masters and such (I don't know all the titles) have got several of these and they look really nice on their uniforms. There are several sights in Virginia and in South Carolina so I think they may have a little impact on our future vacation choices. Of course he still has yet to get the one offered here in Charlotte. Maybe this weekend. . . .

General Update

LSAT:
It's been over a month since last time we posted anything. The dlay is mostly a result of Kelly having just taken the LSAT (entrance exam into Law School). For the weeks leading up to the test date, our evenings were dominated by practice tests. I also spent my evening trying to schedule out several weeks worth of menu's that would distribute the best 'brain food' before the big day. We have a very exciting year coming up. We'll be applying to different law schools all around the country this fall. Then, depending on where we decide to go, we may be moving next summer! Kelly's first choice would be to attend Michigan but he's still willing to consider other schools. Since we have lived in North Carolina for three years we can get instate tuition at UNC-Chapel Hill which would substantially decrease the amount of debt we would accumulate over the three years of school. So we have some big decisions that lay ahead of us but we'll keep everyone posted as we move forward.

Callings:
My choir is doing wonderfully. We are singing 'This is the Christ' in July. Kelly still loves his time with the scouts/teachers. It's getting to be a little bittersweet as they're growing up so fast and many of them are moving away in the next few months. However, they are headed up to a camp out this weekend so he's excited for that.

Family:
We went over and celebrated Sui's birthday with the family last night, which was wonderful. We're so grateful for her! Other than that we are just waiting to hear the final word on my sister Danica's wedding date before we will be flying out to Utah to spend time with the all of our family our there! :)

General:
We're both still working 40+ hours a week so there's not much else that's going on in our lives right now. We are looking into buying a new laptop in the next few months though, so any suggestions would be appreciated!


Lots of love!

The Family

We got together with the family this weekend! We all celebrated Mo’s birthday at the Naeata’s place. It was fabulous to have everyone together again. The sister missionaries were there as well as some new friends the Fords. Sui took some pictures but I (as usual) left our camera at home. So we I’m just going to add some older pictures for reference.

Below is Sui, Mo and Li’i:

Randall & Marianne:

Kelly and I got our wheat-grinder on Friday so I was able to make homemade bread for Sunday. Yea! First time ever, I felt very proud. But the dinner Sui made was delicious! (She's a star cook)

We were all having a fun time sitting around after dinner just chatting when Marianne looked over at where Kelly and I were sitting and said “Are you guys ready to start learning the song? We have the Samoan version of the Lords Prayer.”

Randall got up and pulled out some sheet music. We all sing so I thought ‘sure we can play around with a song in Samoan, that could be fun.’ A few minutes into it I realized we weren’t just goofing off or singing a song for fun, we were REALLY learning the song. Then the bombshell hit, Marianne asked if we had already planned when to sing it in our ward as she hadn’t planned out when we would be singing in their ward yet. Wait! What?

“We’re singing this in church?” I asked, stunned. Now remember I just sang at the Ward talent show Friday night, so the idea of singing again was mildly horrifying.

“Ya.” She looked confused for a moment. “Didn’t we tell you?”

“No.”

“OH!” she laughed, “I guess we forgot to ask you guys. We just planned on all of us getting together to sing. Sui and Mo sing this beautiful song together. Randall and I always ask them to sing it for us but they only had this old faded copy that you could barely read. Randall just got a music program so we took it home and put into the computer. We thought it would be fun if we all sang in both our wards.”

More laughter.

“I guess we should actually ask you. Do you want to sing with us in Church?”

By now we were all laughing. The six of us spend a lot of time together so it’s fairly often that we just assume everyone knows everything when actually we’ve only talked to a few people about it (like calling one spouse and assuming that other knew all about our conversation, ya it happens a lot). This time it was just a little bit bigger information than normal. Apparently, Mo & Sui and Randall & Marianne had talked about it and both assumed the other would tell us. Oh well, we all had a good laugh at it. And the look of pure terror that spread across my face. (Marianne was the one holding me together on Friday night's performance when I wanted to have a melt down.) Of course we are happy to learn the song and we’ll be happy to sing with them. I’m just massively relieved that it’s somewhere in the distant future and nothing that I have to worry about right now. So all in all, good times with the family.

Over a month

WOW! Has it really been over a month since I posted anything. It's because I always think we have nothing new to post and then I get on and think of a million things I could have posted, feel overwhelmed and then quit and sign off. Well, not today. Today I'm determined to finish a post.





New things have been going on in the Gardner house hold. As most everyone knows, we don't have any kids but I've been going through this 'mommy' phase despite the lack of little ones. I've been getting book after book on keeping house, gardening, and (of course) healthy diets. Kelly and I spent a fabulous Saturday with a good friends of ours. Kelly and Randall were replacing the break fluid in our cars and doing other manly things and this left us women folk to work in the house and gossip. (Gossip's probably not the right term but you get the idea)

We spent a good chunk of the afternoon talking about this new book she had just received from her mother-in-law back in Utah. It's 'The Feel Good Cookbook.' After our conversation I was convinced that I needed a copy. It's a little expensive but it's totally worth it!! (And I've become a bit of a cheapskate so that's saying a lot). I have had huge revelations (spiritual as well as temporal) while reading this book. The author is a member of the church so without getting 'overly' religious (for her non-Mormon readers I'm sure) she brings in the gospel and the word of wisdom. Still this book is jam-packed with science and references.

http://www.myfeelgoodfoods.com/

Now, I'm not a health nut, or an organic junkie. I'm actually pretty against a lot of those extreme dieting scheme's. We have a small group of ladies at church that are all about getting natural food straight from the farmer. Which sounds good but I just don't have the time or the energy to put towards worrying about where every little thing I put in my mouth came from. So this book was great for me because it steers away from a lot of that and focuses more on "listening to your body." I can cut down sugar, wheat, and milk but I can't give them up cold turkey for rest of my life.

If you are looking for a healthy all natural way to either get slim, start feeling better, get rid of allergies, control the effects of ADD or even get rid of Fibermialga this book deals with them all. We'll be starting 'the yeast beaters cleanse' soon. I'm pretty excited about it. I just ordered our wheatgrinder (not a required piece of equiptment but very helpful and something I've been looking at purchasing for a long time now).

Oh, and pages 21 though 23 were so amazing! It was one of those times when I just sat back in awe at how amazing the Lord really is. It's all about the Engram, something that's just mind blowing in itself. It just makes you realize how the Lord planned out everything so perfectly!

Anyway back to the diet, breaking our sugar addiction should be an adventure. We'll be starting next week hopefully. Wish us luck!!!

(I've included the link in case anyone is interested in it.)

One of these things is not like the other . . .

I've meantioned it before, we sometimes run across things that we thought were normal and then find out are "Western."

Today I told one of my coworkers I was going to be making zucchini bread this weekend. This was followed up with a look of confusion and doubt.

"Zucchini bread?"

Ya, why? Well come to find out not ONE of my coworkers has ever had zucchini bread, EVER! Only a handful had ever even heard of if it.

This is coming on the tails of a 'Mexican party' we were throwing here at work where I offered to bring enchiladas. Which left three perplexed coworker silent until one finally admitted "I don't know what enchiladas are." I laughed and told them than I'd refrain from asking whether they wanted red or green. After that they looked mildly horrified.